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Call Center Week 2016 Preview: Contact Center Consulting

Call Center Week (June 27-July 1,
at the Mirage in Las Vegas) is drawing ever closer. In the final preview in our series of
conversations with sponsors, we gain insight from the Northridge Group, a
consultancy where the policy is to choose its business leads on the basis of
having an extensive hands-on background in developing and implementing
strategies within the chosen industry.

It’s no secret that companies are competing
more intensely than ever and that it’s become more challenging than ever to
build relationships with customers. “With online buying now the norm and
consumers being continuously inundated with ecommerce offers, companies
naturally focus on offering the right product at the best price,” said Pam
Plyler,Customer Experience and Contact Center, Executive Practice
Lead, of the Northridge Group. “But to differentiate themselves in this
competitive, commoditized environment, they need to better identify customer
needs and deliver across the entire organization.”

Northridge operates under the
premise that traditional customer satisfaction survey methods and metrics generally
lack the necessary depth to provide the level of insights to drive meaningful improvements
in customer loyalty and improved business performance. In addition, there is a
great deal of overlooked behavioral and transactional data that can be
leveraged to gain additional insights into the customer needs.

Plyler,
who comes to the table with more than 20 years of experience in planning and
executing CX initiatives in financial, service and retail operations, believes
that businesses need to pay closer attention to such areas as NPS scores and
customer complaints. “How are people referring to your company on social media?
What are their pain points? Too many companies just don’t use the data that’s
available to them.”

Her background also includes direct
workforce management, training and quality assurance. “There are still a large
number of companies that don’t fully grasp the importance of their front-line
personnel,” said Plyler. “When customers can’t get their answers from the
website or self-service, calls are more complex and emotional than they have
been at any time in the past.”

In
her perspective, QA is more than just checking the boxes, which points to a
need for 3rd party analysis to determine if agents are being judged
by faulty existing measurement systems. Taking such an “outside in” view can
make a difference. “People on the inside tend not to see all of the problems,”
she noted. “When agents and supervisors are constrained by factors beyond their
control, they can’t fix things. Setting up a closed-loop system that identifies
recurring issues helps to ensure that these problems won’t continue.”

She is also a firm advocate of
robust, end-to-end journey mapping which assesses all touch points and allows a
company to know which are causing the customer pain. “If customers are having
issues logging in, is the password reset too complex?” she said. "Every
experience they go through needs to be looked at: purchasing, shipping, follow
up and ongoing service.”

“When companies receive an
independent assessment, there’s no rationalization. What truly matters is the
outcome,” said Plyler. “While every company needs to do journey mapping, it
can’t be done just once and then put in a drawer. A journey map needs to be a
living, breathing document that helps enable a business to create a roadmap for
the future. The goal is to highlight and prioritize specific actions and
initiatives required to reduce repeat calls and escalations and help achieve
the kind of high-level customer experience that can ultimately have a positive
impact on the bottom line.”